The relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis has been frequently debated; nonetheless, one rarely comes upon a thoroughgoing, in-depth treatment of this connection. The Capitalist Unconscious is therefore a belated but welcome inquiry into the points of intersection between the two, a project whose contours could be traced back to the works of Marx and Freud. It is in the work of Lacan, however, that this correlation between Marxism and Psychoanalysis becomes visible. This article explores Samo Tomšič’s analysis of (...) the logical, epistemological, and political continuity of Marx’s critique of political economy and Freud’s theory of libidinal economy, meanwhile appraising the possible emancipatory potential of this project. (shrink)

Bakhtin and Voloshinov argued that dialogue is the intersubjective basis of consciousness, and of the creativity which makes historical changes in consciousness possible. The multiple dialogical relationships give every subject, who has developed through internalising them, the potential to distance him or herself from them. Consciousness is therefore an 'unfinalised' process, always open to a possible future which would not merely reiterate the past. But this book explores its corollary: The relative openness is a field of conflict where rival discourses (...) struggle for hegemony, by subordinating or eliminating their rivals. That is how the unconscious is created out of socio-historical conflicts. Hegemony is always incomplete, because there is always the possibility of a return of its repressed rivals in new combinations. (shrink)

It has been suggested that due to AI-technology-generated gadgets, a digital unconscious enables the probable annulment of the Freudian unconscious. The purpose of this article is to delve into Freudian topography as a way to demonstrate that this foreclosure of the unconscious was somewhat present in Freud as of 1920. In addition, regardless of solid attempts at the extinction of the unconscious by contemporary demands, I will focus on how the capitalist discourse and AI-generated technology (...) propose a different form of social bond. Finally, the conceptualization of pain (_Schmerz_) is important for ascribing a different modality to the Freudian unconscious than in recent dissertations, but most importantly, it is a significant element for analytical experience to function properly where it must not be aligned with suffering. An era without an unconscious may foretell a time where enjoyment, as a form of subjectivity, is effaced. (shrink)

An early work that lays the foundation for establishing a “polemical” dimension to psychoanalysis. We certainly have the unconscious that we deserve, an unconscious for specialists, ready-made for an institutionalized discourse. I would rather see it as something that wraps itself around us in everyday objects, something that is involved with day-to-day problems, with the world outside. It would be the possible itself, open to the socius, to the cosmos...—from The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis In his (...) seminal solo-authored work The Machinic Unconscious, Félix Guattari lays the groundwork for a general pragmatics capable of resisting the semiotic enslavement of subjectivity. Concluding that psychoanalytic theory had become part and parcel of a repressive, capitalist social order, Guattari here outlines a schizoanalytic theory to undo its capitalist structure and set the discipline back on its feet. Combining theoretical research from fields as diverse as cybernetics, semiotics, ethnology, and ethology, Guattari reintroduces into psychoanalysis a “polemical” dimension, at once transhuman, transsexual, and transcosmic, that brings out the social and political—the “machinic”—potential of the unconscious. To illustrate his theory, Guattari turns to literature and analyzes the various modes of subjectivization and semiotization at work in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, examining the novel as if he were undertaking a scientific exploration in the style of Freud or Newton. Casting Proust's figures as abstract mental objects, Guattari maps the separation between literature and science, elaborating along the way such major Deleuze-Guattarian concepts as “faciality” and “refrain,” which would be unpacked in their subsequent A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Never before available in English, The Machinic Unconscious has for too long been the missing chapter from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus project: the most important political extension of May 1968 and one of the most important philosophical contributions of the twentieth century. (shrink)

A wide-ranging exploration of the present, and the future, of the Unconscious. The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it is not always the same. As it emerges in the life of people and societies, the Unconscious is shaped by ever-changing historical conditions: its form depends on the unique 'psychosphere' of each historical age. In the early twentieth century, Freud characterised the Unconscious as the (...) dark side of the well-ordered framework of Progress and Reason. At the end of the past century, Deleuze and Guattari described it as a laboratory: the magmatic force that ceaselessly brings about new possibilities of imagination. Today, at a time of viral pandemics and in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism, the Unconscious has begun to emerge in yet another form. In this book, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi vividly illustrates the form in which the Unconscious will make itself manifest for decades to come, and the challenges that it will pose to our possibilities of political action, poetic imagination, and therapy."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

The focus of this paper lies in the unconscious solidification of capitalist ideology through Lacanian understanding of subjectivity. The analysis intervenes in the ideological fantasy and its inherent antagonisms in order to analyse the way capitalist ideology strives to fill or repress these ruptures in the socio-symbolic edifice. It points to the mode of proliferation of certain objects, which the fantasy puts in the position where they can function as objects of desire, covering the cracks in the (...) socio-symbolic order by filling their own lack. Furthermore, I focus on the establishment and signification of meaning within the capitalist matrix as well as its dialectical overlap with the objects proliferated by the socio-economic system in question. Such simultaneous fusion of lack and excess creates ideological enjoyment and solidifies capitalist ideology in the subject’s fantasy construction. Here lies the strength of capitalist ideology and its appropriation of even some social phenomena into consumerist categories. It is therefore vital to understand how ideology manages to fix its core of enjoyment through a dialectical overlap of meaning and objects to produce a totalized experience of reality. In itself, this already points to the much neglected Lacanian discourse of the Capitalist, revealing how the daily reality of subjects is driven by unconscious fantasy in its dogmatic ideological circle. It also hints to the homology between Lacan's surplus- jouissance and Marx's surplus-value. (shrink)

We certainly have the unconscious that we deserve, an unconscious for specialists, ready-made for an institutionalized discourse. I would rather see it as something that wraps itself around us in everyday objects, something that is involved with day-to-day problems, with the world outside. It would be the possible itself, open to the socius, to the cosmos...--from The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in SchizoanalysisIn his seminal solo-authored work The Machinic Unconscious, Félix Guattari lays the groundwork for a general (...) pragmatics capable of resisting the semiotic enslavement of subjectivity. Concluding that psychoanalytic theory had become part and parcel of a repressive, capitalist social order, Guattari here outlines a schizoanalytic theory to undo its capitalist structure and set the discipline back on its feet. Combining theoretical research from fields as diverse as cybernetics, semiotics, ethnology, and ethology, Guattari reintroduces into psychoanalysis a "polemical" dimension, at once transhuman, transsexual, and transcosmic, that brings out the social and political--the "machinic"--potential of the unconscious.To illustrate his theory, Guattari turns to literature and analyzes the various modes of subjectivization and semiotization at work in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, examining the novel as if he were undertaking a scientific exploration in the style of Freud or Newton. Casting Proust's figures as abstract mental objects, Guattari maps the separation between literature and science, elaborating along the way such major Deleuze-Guattarian concepts as "faciality" and "refrain," which would be unpacked in their subsequent A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.Never before available in English, The Machinic Unconscious has for too long been the missing chapter from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus project: the most important political extension of May 1968 and one of the most important philosophical contributions of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Unquenched desire, the dividing up of the drives, repetition, and symptom are the keywords for the effects that the unconscious, as deciphered by Freud, has on the body. Harmony is not on the agenda, but rather the discordance, unlinking, and arrogance of cynical jouissances. It seems that the discourse of capitalism is today increasing their deleterious consequences - with all of these demonstrative suicides, but also suicides as diverse as those of terrorists, Tibetan monks, those beleaguered by the (...) class='Hi'>capitalist enterprise, and all the hopeless of our time. Hence the question that Lacan posed concerning the possible "humanisation" of this denatured animal, about whom Freud did not hesitate to say that he is a wolf to man, even though he has always made community. What will the psychoanalyst say about possible solutions, he whose act excludes the call to norms of any kind? Humanisation? is the 2013-2014 volume of the annual seminar held by the author at the Clinical College of the Lacanian Field in Paris. (shrink)

In the seminar XVI, D'un Autre à l'autre, in 1968/1969, Jacques Lacan claimed that there is an homology between the function of object a in the unconscious and the Marxian notion of surplus-value. Both concepts in fact revolve around similar axes: their reluctance to be localized in a certain place of the structure and their connection with the notion of surplus. In Chapter 7 of Das Kapital, Marx seems to imagine a purely mythical pre-capitalist society where production is (...) only devoted the pure satisfaction of basic survival needs and where labour is still controlled by the worker according to a certain purpose: with the irruption of the surplus in the capitalist mode of production the very qualitative dimension of the production and reproduction of commodities and human beings is commanded and organized by the pure drive of abstract accumulation. In order to rearticulate the incessant capitalist drive for abstract wealth, the symptom relies on the unsurpassable contradiction between labour-power and living-labour: essential in order. (shrink)

This essay armies that Kant's philosophy provides a justification for free markets. The myths about Kant are that he was a recluse, knew nothing about business, and that his epistemology divorced reason from reality, while his primary interest was metaphysics. Yet Kant's categorical imperative demands obedience even in the face of uncertainty about the external world. Adam Smith described this principle as the inward testimony of an impartial observer. Smith and Kant put individual decisions at the center of morality, but (...) agreed that people have a tendency to make morally inferior choices. Those who propose to regulate the economy are as troubled by this tendency as those they regulate. The self-sacrifice prescription is economically, psychologically, and morally unstable. In recommending market competition. Smith was unconsciously applying a Kantian formula. Market decisions are individual decisions. Individuals prefer to do business with those they trust: this is an incentive to honesty. A morality that depends upon incentives is imperfect but superior to a morality imposed by force. (shrink)

This paper argues that the thought of Lacan and Žižek are to be distinguished at the level of the formal structure of discourse. Although Žižek often situates his own theoretical project in terms of the discourse of the analyst, his work occupies an uneasy place in this position insofar as the discourse of the analyst is directed at the singularity of the subject’s symptom, rather than shared political causes. Drawing on his “Milan Discourse” where Lacan presents the discourse of the (...) capitalist, this paper argues that Žižek discourse inhabits the universe of capitalism, rather than the universe of mastery. Through the development of a modified version of Lacan’s discourse of the capitalist, it is shown that it is possible to derive three additional discourses-- the discourses of biopower, immaterial labor, and critical theory --from the initial discourse of the capitalist. A psychoanalytic approach to these discourses using Lacanian discourse theory goes beyond standard accounts of biopolotical production and immaterial labor by revealing the function of the unconscious and real at work in these discourses, thereby opening new possibilities of engagement. Žižek’s theoretical project is shown to be an important cartography of this new universe of discourse, revealing both how the discourses inhabiting this universe contain certain constitutive deadlocks and devising strategies for engagement where the foe is no longer entirely clear. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Marx's central concern, consistent throughout his works, is to challenge and overcome hierarchical oppositions, which he considers as the core of modern, capitalist societies and the cause of alienation. The young Marx critiques the hierarchical idealism/materialism opposition. In this opposition, idealism abstracts from and reduces all material elements to the mind (or spirit), and materialism abstracts from and reduces all mental abstractions to the body (or matter). The mature Marx sophisticates this critique with (...) his theory of the commodity fetish. The commodity fetish abstracts the exchange-value (the mind) from the commodity's use-value (the body). Although Marx aims to challenge capitalism by abolishing the hierarchical relation among binary oppositions, I show that in his early and later writings on the working-class woman, he reinforces hierarchical binaries, pointing at the gendered unconscious structure of capitalism. (shrink)

How often does an interest or pleasure in your life become something that has to be managed, given a hierarchical position amongst other tasks, and thus becomes a chore alongside other chores? When content and possibility are stripped by scheduling and the demands of capitalist required labour mean that free play or time required for speculative and/or creative thought is removed in the interests of deadlines, what happens to the compassionate, generous and intimate functioning of thought and life? This (...) paper considers how Guattari argues that subjectivities are produced and organised by what he describes as machinic assemblages. Machinic assemblages are those aspects of life that operate to regulate the affective powers of life. Guattari's work on activities such as art making, game play, music and performance provides ways to consider the labour of subjectivity outside of work. I ask the reader to consider what the notion and motivation for play signal. Arguing that a singular life at play is the collective event of play, I describe play as a mediatising form for the production of subjectivity. The play field situates and directs the machinic assemblage of subjectivation through its own forms of mediatisation. (shrink)

The focus of this paper lies in the unconscious solidification of capitalist ideology through Lacanian understanding of subjectivity. The analysis intervenes in the ideological fantasy and its inherent antagonisms in order to analyse the way capitalist ideology strives to fill or repress these ruptures in the socio-symbolic edifice. It points to the mode of proliferation of certain objects, which the fantasy puts in the position where they can function as objects of desire, covering the cracks in the (...) socio-symbolic order by filling their own lack. Furthermore, I focus on the establishment and signification of meaning within the capitalist matrix as well as its dialectical overlap with the objects proliferated by the socio-economic system in question. Such simultaneous fusion of lack and excess creates ideological enjoyment and solidifies capitalist ideology in the subject’s fantasy construction. Here lies the strength of capitalist ideology and its appropriation of even some social phenomena into consumerist categories. It is therefore vital to understand how ideology manages to fix its core of enjoyment through a dialectical overlap of meaning and objects to produce a totalized experience of reality. In itself, this already points to the much neglected Lacanian discourse of the Capitalist, revealing how the daily reality of subjects is driven by unconscious fantasy in its dogmatic ideological circle. It also hints to the homology between Lacan's surplus- jouissance and Marx's surplus-value. (shrink)

Today, capitalism functions as a very complex tool of colonisation capturing our desires, dreams, and putting life itself at risk. Its effects lead us all to times of extreme anxiety increasing the number of people with mental health problems. This paper is concerned with the question of ‘critique’ within this context. How can critical legal scholarship engage with a theoretical mode that allows us to confront the politics of law with today’s capitalism? This analysis shows that contemporary capitalism, which operates (...) as an immanent desiring-machine, is investing in our unconscious. In this sense, we aim to rethink the idea of ‘critique’ as an opportunity to make it creative and effective. As such, this paper argues that the Deleuzian concept Critical and Clinical is particularly useful, as it opens new roots for the critical movement. Taking the literary strategy of Masochism and the experience of the Institutional Psychotherapy movement in France, the clinical–critical practice contributes to push and expand critical scholarship into new terrains of thought and practice. (shrink)

"The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory," wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism: "Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down."Few people at (...) the time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that "the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together." They added, "Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd." These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for Anti-Oedipus, and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded "conceptor," arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of Anti-Oedipus and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde. (shrink)

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates (...) a resistance image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man. (shrink)

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production. Part One is an implicit critique of neo-liberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines, while Part Two returns to apparent lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, particularly the recourse to artistic production as both a form of mnemonics and periodic (and (...) renascent) avant-garde agitation. In-between these twin systems of taking the measure of things, Art and Architecture, as forms of speculative intellectual capital, emerge from the shadow-lands of half-conscious and half-unconscious forces to become gestures toward a type of knowledge that has no utilitarian or generic agency. Defying the tendencies of such discourses to fall prey to instrumental orders that effectively neuter the inherent radical agenda of both, Art and Architecture are represented in this series of essays as noetic apparatuses, operating at the edge of authorized systems of knowledge, quietly and secretly validating and valorizing the shadowy and recondite, collective and personal operations of intellect in service to no particular end. (shrink)

Since Mueller’s 1958 article calling Hegelian dialectics a “legend,” it has been fashionable to deny that Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. But in truth, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has 28 dialectics hidden on four outline levels, and The Philosophy of History has 10 more on three outline levels. In Phenomenology’s macrodialectic, Hegel’s nonsupernatural Spirit–all reality, everything in the universe, including man and artificial objects–advances from unconscious + union (thesis) to conscious + separation (antithesis) to a synthesis of conscious (from the (...) antithesis) + union (from the thesis). Previous interpretations of Phenomenology have missed this dialectic: they have assumed that Spirit’s journey begins with consciousness, whereas the journey actually begins in the primordial state of nature, before man arrives and provides Spirit with its Mind (the collective mind of man). Mind then misperceives itself as a multitude of separate alien “objects”–things other than itself. The macrodialectic and all other dialectics are based on Christianity’s Johannine separation-and-return mythology; all Hegelian dialectics separate from a concept in the thesis, going to that something’s opposite (antithesis), and then return to the thesis concept. Thus, in Hegel’s master-and-slave dialectic (God = master, man = slave), man advances from potential + freedom to actual + bondage (religiosity) to actual + freedom (atheism). Only Marx and Tillich understood Hegelian dialectics. Marx’s basic dialectic (one of four) saw history separating from and returning to Communism, going from communal ownership + poverty (primitive communism, or gens) to private ownership + wealth (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) to communal ownership + wealth (final communism). Tillich’s basic dialectic (one of many) separates from and returns to God, advancing from Yes to God + Yes to supernaturalism (theism) to No to God + No to supernaturalism (atheism) to Yes to God + No to supernaturalism (humanism: humanity is the nonsupernatural “God above the God of theism”). (shrink)

Notes and journal entries document Guattari and Deleuze's collaboration on their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus. "The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory," wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism: "Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior (...) limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down."Few people at the time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that "the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together." They added, "Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd." These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for Anti-Oedipus, and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded "conceptor," arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of Anti-Oedipus and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde. (shrink)

According to the 2020 docudrama, The Social Dilemma, our very addiction to “social media” has, today, become encapsulated in the tensions between its facilitation as a mode of interpersonal communication and as an insidious conduit for machine learning, surveillance capitalism and manipulation. Amidst a variety of interviewees – many of whom are former employees of social media companies – the documentary finishes on a unanimous conclusion: something must change. By using the docudrama as a pertinent example of our “social media (...) malaise,” and while remaining aware of the problems and unethical practices encompassing international digital/social media companies, this paper will argue that we continually refrain from the very question(ing) that would call these companies to account: what does the algorithm desire? In approaching this question, this article will draw from Lacan’s ‘hysterical’ position in accordance with Robert Pfaller’s notion of interpassivity. Together, these concepts will be used to provide a psychoanalytic account of how our subjectivization in social media renders an unconscious endorsement that both frames our awareness of the dilemmas encompassing social media, while also positing an inherent limitation that may offer a possible path out of its impeding affects. This subjective ambivalence – delegated yet reluctantly disavowed – offers an opportunity to realign discussions on the lost object of desire (objet a) and its reproduction in social media algorithms. In so doing, the case will be made that an account of interpassivity can help lay bare the hysterical significance underscoring our digital subjectivization. (shrink)

The Universal proposes a radically new philosophical system that moves from ontology to ethics. Drawing on the work of De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Le Doeuff, among others, and addressing a range of topics from the Asian sex trade to late capitalism, quantum gravity, and Merleau-Ponty's views on cinema, Dorothea Olkowski stretches the mathematical, political, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of continental philosophy and introduces a new perspective on political structures. Straddling a course between formalism and conventionalism, Olkowski develops the concept of (...) an ontological unconscious that arises from our "sensible" relation to the world-the information we absorb and emit that affects our encounters with the environment and others. In this "realm of the senses," or the field of vulnerability defined by our experience with pleasure and pain, Olkowski is able to rethink the space-time relations put forth by Irigaray's notion of the "interval," Bergson's "recollection," Merleau-Ponty's idea of the "flesh," and Deleuze's "plane of immanence." This aesthetic sense is shared by all humankind and nonhuman entities in the organic and inorganic world. The sensible universal can be applied to categories of pure and practical reason; experiential binaries of male-female and subject-object; and issues of autonomy, moral laws, and the regulation of perception. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Antiutopianism: An IntroductionPatricia McManus (bio) and Darko Suvin (bio)Utopia is endangered today! Such a sentence seems redundant: utopia—the shape of the possibility that things could be better—is always in danger. But the present danger is something distinct from the dangers that historically have attended utopia. These have not gone away but, added to them, and largely superseding utopia’s other perils in our twenty-first century, is the disappearance of utopianism (...) from the culture and politics that dominate our collective sense of any future. Politically, this is a conscious and unconscious erasure serving the interests of ecocide and the present mass killings of poverty and declared or undeclared wars. Our axiom is that the unchecked drive for profits will necessarily continue serving such interests, so that we cannot take seriously either presumed new “green” interests as today enforced, or group “identities” unless they challenge that drive.The collection of essays that make up the following “bloc” contains an argument that there is a need, political and historical, to disentangle our understanding of antiutopianism today from the overt “anti-utopianisms” of previous epochs, giving weight if not shape to the Cold War identification of utopia with authoritarianism or uniformity under the fake sign of [End Page 289] “totalitarianism.” Where such older predecessors still linger, they have been turned to face the past, as if those past models of tyranny themselves buried not just particular utopias but also the need for utopia. We now have antiutopianism as a thing in itself, antiutopianism without utopia. It deserves to be taken very seriously, without the hyphen.This argument was first put forward by Darko Suvin in the final essays of his most recent collection Disputing the Deluge (Bloomsbury, 2022). The editor of that collection, Hugh C. O’Connell, glossed Suvin’s use of the unhyphenated term “antiutopianism” as follows: “we might think of antiutopianism today as the blurring of the boundaries between a stalwart negation of all utopian thought... and the hallucinatory proclamations of the End of History accompanying the triumph of the global capitalist world system.”Following the release of Disputing the Deluge, Suvin took up a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Research in Narrative, History and Memory. He developed the materials for a two-day workshop on antiutopianism in early April 2023. After conversation with Patricia McManus, that workshop was titled “Antiutopia as an Enforced Dominant Horizon of Mass Culture,” and it proposed to investigate the causes and consequences of this dominance for personality and utopianism today. It adopted the TV series Game of Thrones as its concrete exemplum. The first day of the workshop was introduced by Suvin’s presentation on the theory of antiutopia(nism), with a response by Antonis Balasopulos; the second day by McManus’s reading of Game of Thrones with a response by Lazar Atanasković. All of these presentations were rewritten for this volume of Utopian Studies. We were happy with the interest generated, which ran to over seventy registrants from all over the world.Suvin’s contribution, “On Antiutopianism in Pragmatics and Narrative,” sets the scene for the interventions that follow it. It engages with two aspects of our present in some detail, the self or woebegone “personality” of late or catastrophic capitalism, and the gathering signs of “neofeudalism,” possibly issuing into a Fascism 2.0, as a way of probing the historical horizon of this capitalism.In his response on the first day, “Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation,” Balasopoulos picked up Suvin’s focusing on the “personality” in relation to both utopia and the bourgeois revolutions. That concept is here subjected to an analysis that traces its filiations with both Social Darwinist and Marxist conceptualizations of “survival.” [End Page 290]The two essays from the second day of the workshop move from the explorations opened by Suvin and Balasopoulos to focus on analysing HBO’s hit TV series Game of Thrones. Following up a suggestion by Suvin, McManus makes the case for understanding the series as articulating antiutopianism and thriving on so doing. Atanasković, in “On the Antiutopian Effect in Game of Thrones,” examines the series’s use of an aesthetic of “Fantastic history,” and... (shrink)

In this essay, I interpret the wildly successful book series Freakonomics as a discourse of perversion. Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Žižekian cultural criticism, I first explore how the books function as neoclassical economic theory in practice, then I explain how the series enjoins us to adopt reading strategies that turn us into perverts. Perversion, rather than a moral judgment, is best considered a structural inversion of the position of enjoyment, schematized as a ◊$. Freakonomics seeks to explain all (...) human behavior as the result of a “hidden force” that organizes social reality—this force is, in every case, an ontological market structure that we all unconsciously obey. The result is that we end up identifying with the mechanisms of the capitalist free market rather than our own idiosyncratic, idiotic desires, and see our desires retroactively narrated as the result of these market mechanisms. If perversion is, following Lacan, about propping up the law, I argue that Freakonomics not only props up, but instantiates, the big Other of the market by disavowing a noneconomic space and registering all of social reality under a single market structure. Freakonomics gives readers, as Lacan puts it, the “ père-version ” of events. (shrink)

An epochal archaeology of the labor power that has been cultivated in the human body over the last two thousand years. If Marx's opus Capital provided the foundational account of the forces of production in all of their objective, machine formats, what happens when the concepts of political economy are applied not to dead labor, but to its living counterpart, the human subject? The result is Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt's History and Obstinacy, a groundbreaking archaeology of the labor power (...) that has been cultivated in the human body over the last two thousand years. Supplementing classical political economy with the insights of fields ranging from psychoanalysis and phenomenology to evolutionary anthropology and systems theory, History and Obstinacy reaches down into the deepest strata of unconscious thought, genetic memory, and cellular life to examine the complex ecology of expropriation and resistance. First published in German 1981, and never before translated into English, this epochal collaboration between Kluge and Negt has now been edited, expanded, and updated by the authors in response to global developments of the last decade to create an entirely new analysis of "the capitalism within us.". (shrink)

The article is devoted to the consideration of the image of zombie in two contexts, which are, firstly, the transformation of capitalist figures of production and consumption, and secondly, the transformation of desire and sensuality. Two models of socio-philosophical interpretation of zombies related to the development of capitalism are revealed: the consumer and the proletarian. They concern the discourse of the economic crisis and the disgust to “irrational consumption” and the discourse of the exploitation of the worker by dead (...) labor. It is noted that the image of zombie embodies total alienation, loss of social connection, which is based on emotional affinity, intimacy and affectivity. The figure of zombie is seen as the opposite of the Enlightenment model of human existence, which is characterized by a fundamental multiplicity, sensitivity and taste, which became the basis of a market economy. The image of zombie represents the fear of dissolving human diversity in the identity of desire and corporeality, which is destroyed and appears as “the same”. Zombies embody the instinct and infectivity of being. They denote “naked life”, the signs of which are the right to kill or exploit them. On the other hand, zombies are the embodiment of Use value: an empty post-capitalist, post-proletarian and post-consumer “life” reduced to pure need. Zombies figure represents the inner contradiction of capitalism: on the one hand, the fear of renewing a Labour power that is no longer able to work, and on the other, the fear of losing sensual diversity that suspends the endless process of consumption. Thus, the fear of zombie is a defensive reaction to capitalist existence. On the other hand, it is an adjustment of consciousness, when the coercion to work and consume is based on the fear of becoming a zombie, in the presence of an unconscious willingness to destroy those whom capitalism excludes as zombies. (shrink)

The concept of “magic realism” raises many problems, both theoretical and historical. I first encountered it in the context of American painting in the mid-1950s; at about the same time, Angle Flores published an influential article in which the term was applied to the work of Borges;1 but Alejo Carpentier’s conception of the real maravilloso at once seemed to offer a related or alternative conception, while his own work and that of Miguel Angel Asturias seemed to demand an enlargement of (...) its application.2 Finally, with the novels of Gabriel García Márquez in the 1960s, a whole new realm of magic realism opened up whose exact relations to preceding theory and novelistic practice remained undetermined. These conceptual problems emerge most clearly when one juxtaposes the notion of magic realism with competing or overlapping terms. In the beginning, for instance, it was not clear how it was to be distinguished from that vaster category generally simply called fantastic literature; at this point, what is presumably at issue is a certain type of narrative or representation to be distinguished from realism. Carpentier, however, explicitly staged his version as a more authentic Latin American realization of what in the more reified European context took the form of surrealism: his emphasis would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself—not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived . In García Márquez, finally, these two tendencies seemed to achieve a new kind of synthesis—a transfigured object world in which fantastic events are also narrated. But at this point, the focus of the conception of magic realism would appear to have shifted to what must be called an anthropological perspective: magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even tribal myth. Recent debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different kind of issue: namely, the problem of the political or mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts, many of which we owe to overtly left-wing revolutionary writers .3 In spite of these terminological complexities—which might be grounds for abandoning the concept altogether—it retains a strange seductiveness which I will try to explore further, adding to the confusion with reference points drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan and from Freud’s notion of the “uncanny,” and compounding it by an argument that magic realism is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.4 1. See Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” Hispania 38 : 187-92.2. See Alejo Carpentier, “Prólogo” to his novel El Reino de este mundo ; the most useful survey of the debate remains Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria, “Carpentier y el realism magico,” in Otros Mundos, otros fuegos, ed. Donald Yates, Congreso International de Literature Iberoamericana 16 , pp. 221-31.3. See Angel Rama, La Novel en America Latina , and especially Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, De Mitólogos y novelistas , in particular the discussions of Gabriel García Márques and Alejo Carpentier.4. My own general frame of reference for “postmodernism” is outlined in my “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 : 53-92. Frederic Jameson, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, is the author of The Prison-House of Language and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. He is also a member of the editorial collective of Social Text. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis” and “Ideology and Symbolic Action”. (shrink)

In 1904-5, Max Weber famously argued that Calvinism had supplied early capitalism with a "spirit" (Geist) without which such capitalist virtues as methodical devotion to task would not have developed. More recently Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in Le Nouvel Espirit de Capitalisme have argued that capitalism always has an esprit, and have traced in outline the history of the spirit of capitalism for the last one hundred years. In my paper I will modify their work to argue that (...) psychoanalysis made a crucial contribution to the spirit of the second industrial revolution (mass production and mass consumption), a contribution that helped reorient modern capitalism toward its contemporary, consumerist direction. This reorientation, I suggest, reflected a fundamental change in the character of the family: the rise of modern personal life. This change, moreover, cannot be understood through sociological means alone since it involved unconscious or depth psychological changes in modern character structure. Highly ambiguous, we are still grappling with its implications. (shrink)

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire. He argues that here, in this 'life', is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately comes to outline (...) and justify the conceptual importance and necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of 'pure' immanence are either apolitical and/or politically incoherent. (shrink)

The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. He seeks not to inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life. Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own existence. Superficially relaxed and tolerant, he finds little use for dogmas of racial and ethnic purity but at the same time forfeits the security of group loyalties and regards everyone as a rival for the favors conferred by (...) a paternalistic state. His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace. Fiercely competitive in his demand for approval and acclaim, he distrusts competition because he associates it unconsciously with an unbridled urge to destroy. Hence he repudiates the competitive ideologies that flourished at an earlier stage of capitalist development and distrusts even their limited expression in sports and games. He extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire. (shrink)

Sohn-Rethel’s theory undermines the line of thought that, from Kant to deconstruction, severs being or the thing from representation, by showing that the Kantian a priori categories of thought are a posteriori effects of the relations of things, to the point that it is ‘only through the language of commodities that their owners become rational beings’. This is the thesis of Marx’s theory of ‘commodity fetishism’, and Sohn-Rethel’s work develops the methodology that follows from it. ‘ Realabstraktion’ means that the (...) commodification of things amounts to their transformation into the language that provides the a priori categories of human thought. As a result, far from being inaccessible to representation, being is precisely that which reveals itself whenever the transcendental categories of representation are laid out. Therefore, Sohn-Rethel’s theory entails that not only can one not separate economy from thought but also economy and thought from being, so that there are no three distinct fields – economy, ontology and epistemology – but one: an economic epistemontology. Just as Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ introduced the unconscious in both subjectivity and economy – ‘they do this without knowing it’ – Sohn-Rethel analysed all economic, intellectual and practical spheres in terms of the fundamental distinction between consciousness and the unconscious. The article also points to certain corrections that Marx’s own theory indicates need to be made in Sohn-Rethel’s account, particularly regarding the source of abstraction, the role of coined money, and the difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production and exchange. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to problematize, from a sociopolitical and psychoanalytic point of view, the current rise of the new rights, especially in Latin America. Although this extremist renaissance is loosely and indicatively referred to as fascism, we believe that, after careful analysis, today’s far-rights are not simple repetitions of the fascisms of the s. XX. It is about an unprecedented governmentality and ideology that, on the one hand, is not reduced to neoliberalism and, on the other hand, (...) surpasses the European-Anglo-Saxon alt-right and contemporary libertarianism. We give it the particular name of liber-fascism, to the extent that it brings a new mode of political subjectivation: the defender of himself. We divide the text into two sections. In the first, we discuss the sociopolitical particularities of liber-fascism: the emergence of a social ontology of the defender of himself that conceives of the capitalist market as an instance to be defended using false news, conspiracy theories and, of course, organized violence. In the second, we clarify the functioning of the liber-fascist unconscious by analyzing the peculiarity of its fantasy: it is an ideology that, in its relationship with others, uses violence no longer as a simple means, but as a vehicle for jouissance. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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ABSTRACT American Transcendentalism, as a nineteenth-century intellectual and social movement, can inform both the academic debate surrounding post-liberalism and the social, political, and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global capitalism, and globalization more generally, defined the era subsequent to World War II until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The manifestation of global capitalism/globalization took place as a function of the rejection, whether conscious or unconscious, of the values embodied in American Transcendentalism as a modern reincarnation of immaterial (...) and idealist Platonism. For example, American Transcendentalism valued renunciation, nature, and spirituality as the means for attaining an ideal personal life while also providing the building blocks for the attainment of a higher form of government and politics at the collective level. As a climactic global modern development, the COVID-19 pandemic provides empirical evidence for the diminishing returns that are inherent to the hegemonic commitment to materialist economy at the expense of corresponding devaluation of commitments to the ideals of transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson forecast the realization of such diminishing returns, in which he asserted the longevity of the impact of transcendentalism would be greater than that of the materialism in his era. Immediately prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, American youth as a generation exhibited “transcendentalist” attributes such as decreasing commitments to religious and partisan affiliations and a trajectory of disillusionment with political participation. American Transcendentalism can be considered and applied as a source of inspiration to inform nascent deliberations on post-liberalism that invoke Platonism and the “transcendental.” In the context of the confluence of demographic changes, calls for post-liberalism, and the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, transcendentalism and its prospective popular reincarnation in the twenty-first century can be applied to generate a new and heretofore hidden transcendental “end of history” narrative as an alternative to the bipolarity of the “end of history” debate. (shrink)

The Virtual Embodied is intended to inform and provoke. It juxtaposes cutting-edge theories, polemics, and creative practices to uncover ethical, aesthetic and ecological implications of why, how and in particular where, human actions, observations and insights take place. It refuses simply to hold a euphoric view of technology yet equally resists the apocalyptic scorn which surrounds the new. The contributors use a range of interdisciplinary strategies to point to a re-worked aesthetic for embodying knowledge and explore such areas as colonialism (...) and the internet, the virtual unconscious in electronic systems, theatre as a virtual space, 'information' and the capitalist society, ecstatic bodies and the rave scene, desire and the 'virtual comfort' zone. In The Virtual Embodied many of the authors, artists, performers and designers apply their interdisciplinary passions to questions of embodied knowledge and virtual space. (shrink)

Freud puts the verse of Virgil as an epigraph to his book on the interpretation of dreams. It is the exclamation of Juno who, after having tried in every way to defeat Aeneas, witnesses his landing on the coast of Lazio and the birth of Rome. She cannot give a reason for her defeat and then:_she sought the earth: and summoned Allecto, the grief-bringer, from the house of the Fatal Furies, from the infernal shadows: in whose mind are sad wars, (...) angers and deceits, and guilty crimes (VII, 323–325)_(The Italian version of the Aeneid by Vittorio Sermonti, Rizzoli, 2007). In the transforming world of cyber space, we ask whether we can bring into interplay our conscious and unconscious parts to dream and interpret the world of digital sociality and of seemingly total knowledge. We further ask whether we can build upon our deeply rooted mechanisms of resistance and rebellion to cultivate the growth of social and individual awareness of the danger of social fragmentation arising from the utopian fantasies of individualism and mobility, and thus confront the dilemmas of surveillance capitalism and autocratic automaton. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Confucian Rituals and the Technology of the Self:A Foucaultian InterpretationHahm ChaibongIntroductionModern political theory is "liberation" theory. Liberalism pivots on the idea of individual liberty, defined largely as freedom from government interference in private lives. All major versions of it, from the Lockian social-contract theory to the Rawlsian theory of justice, focus on protecting the rights of the individual. Marxism and other leftist political theories revolve around the notion of (...) recovering and liberating the original freedom of humanity that has been corrupted or otherwise twisted out of recognition by modern society and its institutions. Rousseau, Marx, and Freud all long for the "total revolution" that will free humanity from the decadence of modern society, capitalism, and even civilization itself.1 In marked contrast to modern Western political theories, Confucianism emphasizes harmony in interpersonal relationships and affirms the role of the family, the community, and the state as essential components of a just and humane society. Civilization is considered both the means and the end of human flourishing, not something to be limited, abolished, or otherwise overcome. In terms of its "micro-theory," Confucianism emphasizes self-discipline, ritual propriety, and moral uprightness, not individual freedom and liberation.At first sight, the disciplined, proper, and moralistic Confucian might seem a far cry from the free, independent, and spontaneous individual of liberalism. The strong emphasis placed on human-relatedness and social harmony, enforced by elaborate codes of ritual conduct, would seem to encourage "rational adjustment to the world," not revolutionary incitement to change it. Confucianism is thus often regarded as the premodern political theory par excellence by modern political theorists. From the May Fourth Movement through the Great Cultural Revolution to the Asian Values debate, Confucianism has always stood as the symbol of feudalism and as the single greatest obstacle to modernity, hindering the development of a scientific outlook, class consciousness, and liberal democratic values.In what follows, however, I argue that the Confucian practices of self-discipline and ritual propriety are quite suitable for a democratic society. Indeed, not only is Confucianism suitable for democracy, but it also fills an important lacuna in modern democratic theory. In a liberal-democratic society, citizens are given ever more freedom to exercise their rights. However, theories of negative freedom and other "primacy-of-rights" theories have privileged individual liberty and rights to such an extent that citizens in a modern democracy have little basis for mutual consultation, deliberation, and agreement. As a result, there is very little in liberal theory, or in [End Page 315] theories of the left, for that matter, that deals with concrete ways in which freedom can be exercised. Confucian theories and practices of self-discipline and ritual propriety can fill this gap in liberal theory.In making this point, I enlist the help of Michel Foucault. Foucault's investigations of ancient Greek and Roman technologies of the self in his later works show that the practices of self-cultivation, self-discipline, and ritual conduct do not necessarily inhibit freedom.2 In fact, such practices are indispensable for the proper practice of freedom. Moreover, Foucault's now-famous investigation of the logic of power, discipline, truth, and knowledge provides a profound insight into the nature of freedom and its practice that is not to be found in currently dominant liberal theories. It provides an important antidote to the common misconception that selfdiscipline and ritual propriety are contrary to individual freedom. Foucault thus provides us with a new perspective from which to investigate and affirm the democratic potential of Confucianism.The Scrutable Body and LiIn the Western philosophical tradition, the metaphysical, the transcendental, or the purely rational has always been the "real." The Platonic eidos, the Christian soul, the Cartesian cogito, and the Kantian noumena all emphasize the priority and the primacy of the metaphysical over the physical as the repository of truth, beauty, and reality. The physical body, on the other hand, has been viewed as the corrupted shadow of the ideal form, the prison of the soul, a mere physical extension or a passing phenomenon. Modern psychology, Freudian or otherwise, emphasizes the conscious/unconscious as the realm that determines our being and character. In contrast... (shrink)

The social function of jazz in its theoretical aspects is the subject of the present article. The author opens his discussion with a technical analysis of jazz music, on the basis of which the social significance of jazz phenomena is elucidated.The peculiar effects of jazz music are by no means limited to the upper layers of society ; they permeate the whole of society. The music has a pseudo-democratic quality, characteristic of the monopolistic phase of capitalism.Jazz music is usually trite, (...) and its orginality, however limited, manifests itself chiefly in the variations of forms in which it is reproduced*The realm of jazz ranges from „salon music“ to the military march* The former expresses a false individualism ; the latter a false collectivism. The Jazz represents a sort of conduit between these two poles, particularly in its form of „hot music“. A theory of jazz will have to dwell especially on this ambivalence. Its meaning is explained by an analogy to eccentric clowns whose inability to obey the norm of regular movement reveals itself finally as a superiority over these rules, which allows the eccentric to play with them. Thus the idea of jazz is to prove that divergence from the norm is observed as a rule throughout the total structure.The pattern of this breaking and observing of the rule at the same time is the syncope. The mechanism of its function is interpreted as a kind of unconscious and paradoxical unity of fear and fulfillment, through obedience and reward by society. The antagonistic character of jazz is expressed by the formula that the „subject of jazz“ permits itself to be annihilated by society in order to feel itself endorsed and vindicated by society.L'article présente certains éléments d'une théorie sociale du Jazz* Il utilise en particulier l'analyse technique, dont les résultats sont interprétés comme expression psychologique de réalités sociales. Le Jazz est défini „phénomène d'interférence“ entre une liberté d'improvisation du sujet, liberté tout apparente, et l'instance sociale à laquelle le sujet est soumis et qui est représenté dans la musique par le rythme et le son fondamentaux rigidement maintenus. Le Jazz lui-même n'est pas irrationnel ou archaïque, il est donné comme tel, il est „fuite du monde des marchandises dans le monde des marchandises“ ; ses traits archaïques sont en tant que tels modernes, c'est-à-dire des régressions psychologiques. C'est pourquoi, précisément en tant que marchandise, il doit se donner à la fois pour ancien et nouveau, original et banal.A l'origine, le produit est banal, originales sont, dans des limites très étroites, les transformations de celui-ci par la reproduction. Mais l'apparente liberté de la reproduction est démasquée par la démonstration qu'elle ne touche pas à la „substance“ banale. Même la rationalisation, en apparence progressive, du processus du travail entre production et reproduction ne correspond pas à la réalité. Particulièrement importante, sur ce point,, est la signification de l'amateur comme représentant du public. Au pôle opposé on trouve la musique d'art d'hier, dépravée et dépouillée de ses éléments progressifs : celle de l'impressionnisme.L'extension du Jazz est limitée par les pôles extrêmes de la musique de salon d'une part, et de la marche d'autre part, celle-là expression d'une illusoire subjectivité, celle-ci expression d'une instance sociale inhumaine. Entre ces extrêmes la „Hot Musique“ prend une position intermédiaire paradoxale et elle s’est stabilisée aujourd’hui en „Jazz classique“. C’est celui-ci que doit considérer en premier lieu la théorie du Jazz. Celle-ci est rapprochée de la figure de 1’ „excentrique“ : de même que l’incapacité de celui-ci d’obéir aux lois du mouvement s’affirme comme un jeu supérieur, ainsi l’idée du Jazz est de démontrer la rupture de la norme — la syncope — à travers toute la structure comme l’achèvement de la norme même. Le mécanisme qui agit dans ce cas, comme dans celui des „steeps“ ralentis (Gehtanz) est de nature érotique : unité d’angoisse, de tentative d’évasion, et d’assouvissement par le fait de trouver dans la société à la fois place et récompense. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of disalienation, (...) that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

Transversality occupies a central place in Guattari's thought, appearing in his early writings on institutional analysis and on through to his final work, Chaosmosis. Transversality is thus particularly pertinent to understanding Guattari's critique of semiocapitalism and his goal of re-imagining forms of institutional subjectivisation as a way to free the unconscious from structures of lack and the desire for punishment, the very structures upon which capitalism relies for its reproduction. If there is one institution that has taken advantage of (...) semiocapitalism's ability to mask its role in the reproduction of capitalist subjectivity, however, it is the contemporary neoliberal University. This essay thus brings transversality to bear upon the question of the University in semiocapitalism, focusing on the discourses that speak in defence of the humanities. Though defences of the humanities are intended to argue for the humanities’ usefulness in contemporary society, transversality exposes such discourses as the speech of a ‘subjugated group’ whose only effect is to reinforce existing structures of lack and punishment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural MarxismPaul Allen Miller (bio)Jameson, Fredric. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 296 pp.Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide-ranging contributions as Jameson. From his (...) early work on Sartre’s style, passing through the twin opera on dialectical theory (Marxism and Form) and formalism and structuralism (Prisonhouse of Language), and the idiosyncratic appreciation of Wyndham Lewis (Fables of Aggression) to that summa of Marxist hermeneutics, The Political Unconscious, and from his major collection of essays, The Ideologies of Theory, through his books on Adorno (Late Marxism) and film (Signatures of the Visible), to that foundational text on postmodern literature, theory, art, and architecture, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and the late work on world cinema (The Geopolitical Aesthetic), utopianism (The Seeds of Time), Brecht (Brecht and Method), modernity (A Singular Modernity), and science fiction (Archaeologies of the Future), Jameson’s career is unparalleled in the American letters. It is perhaps not coincidental, either, that this larger-than-life figure on the intellectual stage ranging easily from Russian formalism to Deleuzean antihumanism, from Balzac to Frank Gehry, and from Hegel to Derrida, is an intellectual dissident. Contemporary American life’s alternation between uncritical consumerism (Marcuse’s one-dimensional man) and nonothing anti-intellectualism (Christian fundamentalism and corporate-fueled jingoism) could only produce such a body of work as an alien presence: its own systemic negation and thus the fullest expression of its deepest internal contradictions. The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.Naturally, as with any collection of interviews, not every thing is new here. Indeed, to the seasoned reader of Jameson, much of this is familiar territory, and there is a fair amount of repetition from one interview to the next (Goethe’s concept of “world literature,” for example, is a recurring motif). Nonetheless, there are many moments of real insight and bold commentary that remind us why Marxism is far from dead and how Jameson has achieved an iconic status rivaling that of Lukacs, Althusser, or Eagleton, as one of the preeminent Marxist thinkers of the last century. Many of these come in the form of vignettes, little snippets of cultural analysis. One such comes in Jameson’s interview with Columbia University Professor of History Anders Stephanson. Here Stephanson asks Jameson to comment on the recent architectural and cultural phenomenon of creating ersatz public spaces. These come in the form of commercial areas that present themselves in guise of “squares,” “plazas,” or “villages.” They make reference to and pastiche traditional forms of life and then re-represent them in the form of a hypercapitalist consumerism. These simulacra of less alienated, precapitalist forms of [End Page 65] life are then presented as depthless surfaces, parodies of authenticity. The archetype of such ersatz public spaces is Disney’s EPCOT:Stephanson: In other words, you are referring to his compressed version of the world; little toy countries where you can orient yourself in no time at all.Jameson: I suppose you can orient yourself because walking paths are available. But where you actually are is a real problem, for you may in fact be in the Florida Everglades, and in this case you are not only in a swamp but also in a simulacrum of a different geographical complex altogether. Disneyland is, on the whole, supremely prophetic and paradigmatic of these multiple shifting and dissolving spatial levels. (49)This is both an insightful observation and a wonderful example of Jameson’s dialectic at work. One moment we’re walking hand in hand with Goofy round the little, fake Eiffel Tower of EPCOT and the next we sink into the morass that paved the Everglades, acquired control... (shrink)

In so-called “democratic” societies, advertising of consumer products has remarkable success increasing demand for consumer products by manipulating people’s unconscious desires. The prerequisite for a democracy is maturity, in the sense of a rational, autonomous self-determinacy, which should lead to a suspicion of the methods used to sell many consumer products. Under the economic conditions faced by one today, one is forced into a situation in which one is unable to determine the nature of one’s own existence in vital (...) ways. Immaturity, conformity and dependence are consequences of this economic condition. Democratic values are important to everyone, both the mature individual and the immature individual alike. These values of rational self-determinacy, autonomy and maturity are being sold to people in very phony and dangerous ways. This paper argues that, advertising – by manipulating conditions of immaturity, conformity and dependence – is incompatible with the aims of democracy, which requires autonomous, free thinking, and mature individuals to determine themselves in order to participate appropriately in governing their society. This tendency for individuals to falsely identify with democratic values undermines the possibility of a real democracy. This paper argues this by: formulating Kant’s conception of the way-out of self-incurred immaturity in psychoanalytic terminology; describing the importance of one’s work life to one’s psychological well-being, and outlining Marx’s ideas about the way that the capitalist mode of production leads to alienation and the inability to meaningfully determine one’s existence; discussing the predominance of narcissism in consumer culture and the individual’s conformity to the interests served by this culture due to the dependence on an existence over which the individual has no control; explaining Freud’s ideas about the role of narcissism in relation to the submission of individuals to authority in groups, along with Adorno’s criticism of the way that conditions of conformity can be manipulated; and discussing the culture industry and the role of advertising in manipulating the condition of conformity and dependence by releasing narcissistic libidinal energy into consumer products. This is done by selling what Adorno calls a ‘pseudo-maturity’ to those who are psychologically incapable of the true maturity and autonomy necessary for democracy. (shrink)

La théorie économique de Marshall doit être comprise à partir de la situation du capitalisme anglais parvenu à maturité. Elle a pour but une analyse pratiquement utilisable des prix et du marché — et non pas la mise au jour des fondements sociaux qu'avaient commencée les classiques, ni, non plus, l'apologie systématique de ce qui est, telle que l'a entreprise l'école continentale de l'utilité marginale. La technique neutre de Cournot qui considère offre et demande en fonction du prix, constitue le (...) point de départ de la théorie de Marshall.Mais Marshall ne réussit pas à maintenir une telle neutralité ; bien plutôt sa méthode implique-t-elle inconsciemment une certaine structure de la doctrine de la valeur et de la répartition. L'auteur analyse les contradictions internes des hypothèses non étudiées. Marshall définit les frais de production comme sacrifice et effort. L'équivalence établie entre les grandeurs psychiques et les frais de l'argent lui permet de mettre en parallèle les facteurs de la production dans la théorie de la valeur, et de juxtaposer tout d'abord, en leur reconnaissant les mêmes droits, intérêt et salaire. Mais cette équivalence conduit à des problèmes insolubles dans la théorie du salaire. D'autres apories apparaissent avec l'introduction de capitaux individuels limités et avec une analyse plus précise de la doctrine du rendement croissant et décroissant de certaines industries au point de vue de l'ensemble économique.La discussion de ces questions a conduit à la dissolution de l'école de Marshall et montré que la théorie économique moderne, dès ses hypothèses fondamentales, est inférieure à la position du problème en termes sociaux que l'on trouve chez les classiques.Marshall's economic theory is to be understood in the light of advanced English capitalism. His goal is a practical, workable price and market analysis, not an analysis of the social bases, which the classical writers had begun, nor a systematic apology for the existing order, which the marginal utility school on the continent has undertaken. Cournot's neutral technique of the treatment of supply and demand as functions of price provides the point of departure for Marshall's theory.Marshall is not able to maintain such a neutrality, however, for his method unconsciously implies definite concepts of value and distribution. The author traces the contradictions inherent in these unexpressed presuppositions. For example, Marshall defines real costs as sacrifices and efforts. The equation of such psychological quantities with money costs permits him to accept the parallelism of the factors of production in the value theory and to set interest and wages side by side. But this equation sets up insoluble problems of wage theory. Other dilemmas arise with the introduction of limited individual capital and with the more exact analysis of the theory of increasing and decreasing profits in individual industries when viewed from the economic system as a whole.The discussion of these questions among economists has led to the dissolution of the Marshall school and has shown that modern economic theory, right from its basic presuppositions, has retrogressed from the classical formulation of the social character of economic problems. (shrink)